Pinnacle acquires Enable Business Solutions Limited

Global News

22
Feb
2021

Editor

Global legal technology consultancy Pinnacle has acquired leading pitch automation vendor Enable Business Solutions Limited, in a move that will accelerate the joint company’s global expansion and bring together its risk, finance and business development expertise.

The tie-up will see Enable’s two products, PitchPerfect and RevenueManager embedded within the consultancy and managed services capability of Pinnacle.

The entire Enable team will join Pinnacle, which was formed from the three-way merger of Pinnacle, Opes and Athenian in 2018, and has over 100 people based in the UK, Continental Europe and North America.

Led by CEO Mike Bailey, Pinnacle has strong partnerships with Thomson Reuters and Intapp.  While in the UK it is focussed heavily on finance and risk, in the United States it has made inroads within the business development community. The plan is to leverage Enable’s BD-focused technology to further grow that customer base globally.

PitchPerfect is the brainchild of Enable’s founder Liam Flanagan, who is a former founder of Tikit. It helps professional services organisations to automatically create high quality pitch documents.  As a result of the acquisition, Enable will accelerate planned investment in PitchPerfect’s product support and development capabilities. It has key clients in North America, the UK, Europe and Australia, and is now better placed to expand in each of these markets working alongside the Pinnacle international sales and technical teams.

PitchPerfect users work within the Microsoft Office toolset utilising the existing user skills of Word, PowerPoint or Excel making it a very easy product to adopt within organisations. It plays to Pinnacle’s thinking that users know these Microsoft applications and intuitively want to work within them.

Enable’s RevenueManager product helps businesses to reduce lock up through the enforcement of time recording policies, working alongside and complementing most leading time recording applications.

Mike Bailey, CEO of Pinnacle said: “Pinnacle has a very strong consulting practice delivering value to its clients by helping to implement leading software solutions such as Elite 3E as well as the One Place product suite from Intapp. Through the acquisition of Enable we will now have two of our own industry leading software solutions that will fit seamlessly into our strategy of being able to help our existing and future clients (both international and domestic) to improve profits and efficiencies as well as manage risk. The acquisition also provides a platform for the launch of Pinnacle’s UK business development and experience consulting practice, both areas where we are particularly strong in the US.”

He added: “One thing that we’ve learned from the merger in 2018 is that by bringing like-minded people together you get where you need to go faster. Without the merger, I don’t think we could have achieved what we have in the last two years in terms of scale and capability. Together with Enable we will be able to further accelerate our offering, which makes the expanded business extremely exciting”.

Pinnacle has a managed services offering that accounts for around 15% of revenue, under which firms outsource their Thomson Reuters 3E and Intapp work to Pinnacle. It has a three-year managed services agreement with a large international law firm and plans to expand this area further, including looking at further acquisitions.

Flanagan said: Now with many of the largest firms in the world as users of our software “I am delighted that we are able to join with and be part of such a forward-looking and compatible organisation as Pinnacle. I have known Mike Bailey and the other directors of Pinnacle for many years and know that they will continue to support and develop our industry leading solutions to meet our clients ever evolving and complex requirements.”